Comparing MOPSO Approaches for Hydrothermal Systems Operation Planning

Hydrothermal operational planning is categorized as an optimization problem that demands operational strategies of hydroelectric power plants in order to minimize the use of thermoelectric power plants, while maintaining the highest possible level of system's reservoirs during planning period. Moreover, the problem must meet a set of complex constraints. We showed in this paper that it is possible to tackle the medium-term planning of hydrothermal systems as a multi-objective problem. The particles were represented as vectors indicating the monthly generation of hydropower. We applied some three recent swarm based multi-objective optimizers, MOPSO-CDR, MOPSO-DFR and SMPSO. This trade-off is presented in Pareto Fronts, which can be used for decision making. Among the assessed approaches involving a system composed of eight Brazilian hydroelectric plants, we observed that the MOPSO-CDR returned the best results and it is worth to include seeds from mono-objective approaches to improve the convergence capacity. We included the result achieved by the PSO-CLANM algorithm and it generated effective results.